But it's not a push for more skiers. The master plan - which includes a year-round zip line course and utilitarian additions like a short surface lift, expanded snowmaking capacity and chairlift replacement - would accommodate a mere 360 additional daily skiers at Arapahoe Basin.

It's about creating a fuller, safer ski experience, said the ski area's chief, Alan Henceroth, noting that several new intermediate blue runs will surround the steep new terrain.

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On the big screen at Wednesday's meeting, Henceroth showed an aerial winter photograph of the now out-of-bounds "Steep Gullies" area of the The Beavers. The near vertical fingers of snow tumbling down rock-lined gullies are so carved with ski tracks it looks just like the open terrain across the boundary rope.

"This place already functions like a ski area. It is lift-served out-of-bounds skiing. It's in the ski area in every way except it's not," said Henceroth. "We think what we are proposing is not really a change from what it is now."

Six people have died in avalanches in The Beavers in the last three decades, five of them in the Steep Gullies. One attendee at Thursday's meeting said the area was not just double-black diamond terrain but "more like triple black."

The area's dark history is an impetus to incorporating the terrain into the boundary, which Arapahoe Basin's founders imagined more than 50 years ago as part of the ski area. The Steep Gullies would be hike-out accessible under the expansion plan and ski patrollers would mitigate avalanche risk on the vertiginous slopes.

"It's really time we make this part of the ski area and put it in a real, bona fide snow management program," said Henceroth, noting that his ski patrollers regularly join local search and rescue personnel in venturing into the terrain for rescues "at great personal risk."

"It's really time that we as a community do something about it," he said.

The Beavers terrain is inside Arapahoe Basin's Special Use Permit boundary and is zoned for skiing under the Forest Service's 2002 land and resource management plan for the White River National Forest, the most skied national forest in the country. That 2002 plan recommended that ski areas propose expansion when surging visits support growth. Arapahoe Basin in the last decade has added new lifts, new terrain and a mid-mountain lodge as its visits have grown from an average of 235,000 in the 1990s to an average near 400,000, with a peak of 450,000 in 2010-11.

Wednesday's public meeting is what the Forest Service calls "front loading" a growth proposal. Gathering public input early in the master development plan — or MDP — process helps hone a final proposal. It will then undergo intensive federal environmental review — an Environmental Impact Statement, or an EIS — under the National Environmental Policy Act.

"If there are any red flags, they will come up through the MDP process," said Shelly Grail Braudis, snow ranger for the Dillon Ranger District of the White River National Forest. "At some I point I see this moving through an EIS once we finish this acceptance process and see what we want to see in the MDP and make sure as much thought as possible is going into this plan."

Cale Osbourne, a sergeant in charge of special operations for the Summit County Sheriff's Office, said he scrambles his squad for rescues in The Beavers "a handful" of times each winter. Having the area as part of the ski terrain could reduce risks for his team.

"We do like the added snow safety program and the added personnel," he said. "When we do go out there, that added component of having that ski patroller there, it makes our response that much better."

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